Tuesday, 7 September 2010

Over the long weekend the Library and Archives Canada website continued to show the fully functional system status. While that was true of much of the site, you may have used it without any problems, it was not so for obtaining bibliographic details. On Saturday evening a search for title keywords produced a list of hits, but when you tried to get details the message returned was:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, cic@nlc-bnc.ca and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

So I sent an e-mail to the address above and received the following automated response:

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Unable to deliver message to the following recipients, because the message was forwarded more than the maximum allowed times. This could indicate a mail loop.

It's frustrating, you're at the mercy of an unthinking machine. Does LAC considers this situation satisfactory? If not, what remedial action will be taken?